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Carbon Dating Gets a Reset. From Nature magazine. The carbon clock is getting reset. Climate records from a Japanese lake are set to improve the accuracy of the dating technique, which could help to shed light on archaeological mysteries such as why Neanderthals became extinct.
The technique hinges on carbon- 1. Organisms capture a certain amount of carbon- 1. By measuring the ratio of the radio isotope to non- radioactive carbon, the amount of carbon- 1. The clock was initially calibrated by dating objects of known age such as Egyptian mummies and bread from Pompeii; work that won Willard Libby the 1. Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But even he “realized that there probably would be variation”, says Christopher Bronk Ramsey, a geochronologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the latest work, published today in Science.
Various geologic, atmospheric and solar processes can influence atmospheric carbon- 1. As a rule, carbon dates are younger than calendar dates: a bone carbon- dated to 1. Marine records, such as corals, have been used to push farther back in time, but these are less robust because levels of carbon- 1. Two distinct sediment layers have formed in the lake every summer and winter over tens of thousands of years. The researchers collected roughly 7. Preserved leaves in the cores — “they look fresh as if they’ve fallen very recently”, Bronk Ramsey says — yielded 6. Archaeologists vehemently disagree over the effects changing climate and competition from recently arriving humans had on the Neanderthals' demise.
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The more accurate carbon clock should yield better dates for any overlap of humans and Neanderthals, as well as for determining how climate changes influenced the extinction of Neanderthals. She will lead efforts to combine the Lake Suigetsu measurements with marine and cave records to come up with a new standard for carbon dating. Dating Sites That Can Sell. The article was first published on October 1.